Finished! Looks like this project is out of data at the moment!
Nature SPAM Filter project is now complete! Thank you for all your help. Stay in touch to learn about results
Results
8 September 2025
Data collection stage of Nature SPAM Filter is completed. Thank you for all your amazing help!
Since our launch in February, 8,422 volunteers have contributed an extraordinary 9.6 million classifications, fully retiring 1,362,000 subjects. This means that you have worked through 681,000 newspaper headlines! This is a remarkable collective achievement. We are deeply grateful for the time, patience and dedication you all have brought to the project.
Read more about our next steps in this Talk thread.
26 March 2025
No "official" results yet, but here is our latest newsletter (26 March 2025) with some stats and curiosities:
Hello Nature SPAM Filter Volunteers!
As you may have figured from the email subject, we have some big news: Nature SPAM Filter is now live on Zooniverse mobile app. Now you can search for real animal names in the news right on your phone. Try it out!
The first month of Nature SPAM Filter has been fantastic. We are 3000+ participants strong - with over 2,000,000 classifications and 270,000+ completed subjects! THANK YOU.
Join the Conversation
We have been busy answering all your interesting queries, with more than 600 comments. Please do keep in touch on https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/dverissimo/nature-spam-filter/talk/6734 - there are no “silly” questions! Here are some examples of the tricky titles that our volunteers have pointed out:
Humps on the Way to Camel Dairy
When we see the word ‘camel’ we might instinctively think of wildlife. However, camels also have a long history of domestication, and in this case, the article is not about wild animals.
Brumbies Sneak into Semi-Finals
This one should be clear — sports article! However, ‘brumbies’ is actually an animal name, specifically, a free-roaming feral horse in Australia. So this is a ‘yes’ for including an animal name!
Engineers Still Working on Bogged Jumbo
If you’ve read our Field Guide, you should remember that the word ‘jumbo’ often refers to elephants. But stay vigilant! In this case, it is actually describing a jumbo jet.
And one last example…
Rare Quoll Spotting Excites Rangers
If you haven’t met a quoll before, let us introduce you to this lovely, but very rare Australian marsupial:
(Image source: APOPO, 2014)
Adorable, we know.
A special thanks!
We want to shout-out @ValThomas for being the most active volunteer in the Talk Forum! They’ve been sharing the weird cases they’ve encountered along with the results from their detective work — decoding the meaning of an ambiguous word is not always easy. Thank you for going the extra mile, @ValThomas, keep it up!
We’ve listened
We’ve updated our FAQ https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/dverissimo/nature-spam-filter/about/faq and Tutorials to include some of the questions and concerns you raised on Talk https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/dverissimo/nature-spam-filter/talk.
Keep going
Your amazing work is instrumental in assessing the accuracy of machine learning models - and making analysis of digital nature-related information more reliable. If we can keep up this pace you will help make the Nature SPAM Filter a reality!
Happy classifying,
Alexandra, Lukas, Alisa, Isabelle, Diogo & Robert